I’ve been annoying everybody recently by recommending the TV show Sally4Ever. Whatever the conversation topic is, I will find a way to interject: “OK, but have you been watching Sally4Ever?” If they haven’t, I pursue them like a debt collector. Nobody escapes. Friends, colleagues, family. Soon I’ll be writing to newspapers and stopping people in the street.

I enjoy scripted comedy enormously, but in recent years the things that inspire tears of laughter have been real life instances of hilarity: things my friends say; people on the internet making excellent jokes or telling absurd anecdotes (the internet can still be good!); videos of excruciating awkwardness or cats missing a jump that a hamster could have landed. But Sally4Ever has brought me back to the joys of TV comedy. Even more, it’s a throwback to that agonising wait for each episode, which are released weekly on Sky Atlantic. It is rare nowadays, in the age of binge watching, to get in, throw one’s bag down in excitement, grab a snack and settle down, just knowing laughs are guaranteed after a long wait of seven days.

Created by Julia Davis, best known for her incredibly dark and brilliant comedy Nighty Night, Sally4Ever has sculpted my abs via belly laughs. Some pals and I are now into the territory of quoting lines at each other, the way men do with The Big Lebowski. Sally4Ever covers all bases: the driest wit, physical humour, gross-out vignettes that are almost too hard to watch, improvised set pieces (the driving sequence in episode two is up there with The Italian Job, even Thelma & Louise).

True pleasure is a play without an interval

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Every slight movement of Catherine Shepherd’s face should win its own Bafta award. Joanna Scanlan needs to be lauded for stealing every scene she’s in (in everything). Alex Macqueen’s cry-face rivals Claire Danes’ in Homeland. I could go on, because every single performance is excellent. Including, of course, Davis herself, and her off-screen husband Julian Barratt.

When talking about funny women, people reference Christopher Hitchens’ infamous Vanity Fair essay in which he said women were incapable of being funny because they do not need to be to find a mate. Bridget Christie skewered this beautifully: “Women are not going to die out if they can’t tell a good joke, whereas men will, according to Christopher Hitchens, who tried to prove his theory by putting no jokes into his essay and then dying.”

I would argue that among the current crop of standup and scriptwriters, it is women who are landing the laughs. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s script for Killing Eve, plus Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh’s performances. Mae Martin is writing another Radio 4 series. Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, Katherine Ryan, Sarah Silverman, Lolly Adefope: you have all brought me great happiness, and a much diminished social life.